7
Her heart was thumping hard-hard-hard. She had been scared before when she consciously tried to far-see or thought-read, but never scared like this. Never even close.
What are you going to do if you find out?
That was a question for later, because she might not be able to. A sneaking, cowardly part of her mind hoped for that.
Abra put the first two fingers of her left hand on the picture of Bradley Trevor because her left hand was the one that saw better. She would have liked to get all her fingers on it (and if it had been an object, she would have held it), but the picture was too small. Once her fingers were on it she couldn’t even see it anymore. Except she could. She saw it very well.
Blue eyes, like Cam Knowles’s in ’Round Here. You couldn’t tell from the picture, but they were that same deep shade. She knew.
Right-handed, like me. But left-handed like me, too. It was the left hand that knew what pitch was coming next, fastball or curveb—
Abra gave a little gasp. The baseball boy had known things.
The baseball boy really had been like her.
Yes, that’s right. That’s why they took him.
She closed her eyes and saw his face. Bradley Trevor. Brad, to his friends. The baseball boy. Sometimes he turned his cap around because that way it was a rally cap. His father was a farmer. His mother cooked pies and sold them at a local restaurant, also at the family farmstand. When his big brother went away to college, Brad took all his AC/DC discs. He and his best friend, Al, especially liked the song “Big Balls.” They’d sit on Brad’s bed and sing it together and laugh and laugh.
He walked through the corn and a man was waiting for him. Brad thought he was a nice man, one of the good guys, because the man—
“Barry,” Abra whispered in a low voice. Behind her closed lids, her eyes moved rapidly back and forth like those of a sleeper in the grip of a vivid dream. “His name was Barry the Chunk. He fooled you, Brad. Didn’t he?”
But not just Barry. If it had been just him, Brad might have known. It had to be all of the Flashlight People working together, sending the same thought: that it would be okay to get into Barry the Chunk’s truck or camper-van or whatever it was, because Barry was good. One of the good guys. A friend.
And they took him . . .
Abra went deeper. She didn’t bother with what Brad had seen because he hadn’t seen anything but a gray rug. He was tied up with tape and lying facedown on the floor of whatever Barry the Chunk was driving. That was okay, though. Now that she was tuned in, she could see wider than him. She could see—
His glove. A Wilson baseball glove. And Barry the Chunk—
Then that part flew away. It might swoop back or it might not.
It was night. She could smell manure. There was a factory. Some kind of
(it’s busted??)
factory. There was a whole line of vehicles going there, some small, most big, a couple of them enormous. The headlights were off in case someone was looking, but there was a three-quarters moon in the sky. Enough light to see by. They went down a potholed and bumpy tar road, they went past a water tower, they went past a shed with a broken roof, they went through a rusty gate that was standing open, they went past a sign. It went by so fast she couldn’t read it. Then the factory. A busted factory with busted smokestacks and busted windows. There was another sign and thanks to the moonlight this one she could read: NO TRESPASSING BY ORDER OF THE CANTON COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPT.
They were going around the back, and when they got there they were going to hurt Brad the baseball boy and go on hurting him until he was dead. Abra didn’t want to see that part so she made everything go backwards. That was a little hard, like opening a jar with a really tight cap, but she could do it. When she got back where she wanted, she let go.
Barry the Chunk liked that glove because it reminded him of when he was a little boy. That’s why he tried it on. Tried it on and smelled the oil Brad used to keep it from getting stiff and bopped his fist in the pocket a few ti—
But now things were reeling forward and she forgot about Brad’s baseball glove again.
Water tower. Shed with broken roof. Rusty gate. And then the first sign. What did it say?
Nope. Still too quick, even with the moonlight. She rewound again (now beads of sweat were standing out on her forehead) and let go. Water tower. Shed with broken roof. Get ready, here it comes. Rusty gate. Then the sign. This time she could read it, although she wasn’t sure she understood it.
Abra grabbed the sheet of notepaper on which she had curlicued all those stupid boy names and turned it over. Quickly, before she forgot, she scrawled down everything she had seen on that sign: ORGANIC INDUSTRIES and ETHANOL PLANT #4 and FREEMAN, IOWA and CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
Okay, now she knew where they had killed him, and where—she was sure—they had buried him, baseball glove and all. What next? If she called the number for Missing and Exploited Children, they would hear a little kid’s voice and pay no attention . . . except maybe to give her telephone number to the police, who would probably have her arrested for trying to prank on people who were already sad and unhappy. She thought of her mother next, but with Momo sick and getting ready to die, it was out of the question. Mom had enough to worry about without this.
Abra got up, went to the window, and stared out at her street, at the Lickety-Split convenience store on the corner (which the older kids called the Lickety-Spliff, because of all the dope that got smoked behind it, where the Dumpsters were), and the White Mountains poking up at a clear blue late summer sky. She had begun to rub her mouth, an anxiety tic her parents were trying to break her of, but they weren’t here, so boo on that. Boo all over that.
Dad’s right downstairs.
She didn’t want to tell him, either. Not because he had to finish his book, but because he wouldn’t want to get involved in something like this even if he believed her. Abra didn’t have to read his mind to know that.
So who?
Before she could think of the logical answer, the world beyond her window began to turn, as if it were mounted on a gigantic disc. A low cry escaped her and she clutched at the sides of the window, bunching the curtains in her fists. This had happened before, always without warning, and she was terrified each time it did, because it was like having a seizure. She was no longer in her own body, she was far-being instead of far-seeing, and what if she couldn’t get back?
The turntable slowed, then stopped. Now instead of being in her bedroom, she was in a supermarket. She knew because ahead of her was the meat counter. Over it (this sign easy to read, thanks to bright fluorescents) was a promise: AT SAM’S, EVERY CUT IS A BLUE RIBBON COWBOY CUT! For a moment or two the meat counter drew closer because the turntable had slid her into someone who was walking. Walking and shopping. Barry the Chunk? No, not him, although Barry was near; Barry was how she had gotten here. Only she had been drawn away from him by someone much more powerful. Abra could see a cart loaded with groceries at the bottom of her vision. Then the forward movement stopped and there was this sensation, this
(rummaging prying)
crazy feeling of someone INSIDE HER, and Abra suddenly understood that for once she wasn’t alone on the turntable. She was looking toward a meat counter at the end of a supermarket aisle, and the other person was looking out her window at Richland Court and the White Mountains beyond.
Panic exploded inside her; it was as if gasoline had been poured on a fire. Not a sound escaped her lips, which were pressed together so tightly that her mouth was only a stitch, but inside her head she produced a scream louder than anything of which she would ever have believed herself capable:
(NO! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!)
8
When David felt the house rumble and saw the overhead light fixture in his study swaying on its chain, his first thought was
(Abra)
that his daughter had had one of her psychic outbursts, though there hadn’t been any of that telekinetic crap in years, and never anything like this. As things settled back to normal, his second—and, to his mind, far more reasonable—thought was that he had just experienced his first New Hampshire earthquake. He knew they happened from time to time, but . . . wow!
He got up from his desk (not neglecting to hit SAVE before he did), and ran into the hall. From the foot of the stairs he called, “Abra! Did you feel that?”
She came out of her room, looking pale and a little scared. “Yeah, sorta. I . . . I think I . . .”
“It was an earthquake!” David told her, beaming. “Your first earthquake! Isn’t that neat?”
“Yes,” Abra said, not sounding very thrilled. “Neat.”
He looked out the living room window and saw people standing on their stoops and lawns. His good friend Matt Renfrew was among them. “I’m gonna go across the street and talk to Matt, hon. You want to come with?”
“I guess I better finish my math.”
David started toward the front door, then turned to look up at her. “You’re not scared, are you? You don’t have to be. It’s over.”
Abra only wished it was.
9
Rose the Hat was doing a double shop, because Grampa Flick was feeling poorly again. She saw a few other members of the True in Sam’s, and nodded to them. She stopped awhile in canned goods to talk to Barry the Chink, who had his wife’s list in one hand. Barry was concerned about Flick.
“He’ll bounce back,” Rose said. “You know Grampa.”
Barry grinned. “Tougher’n a boiled owl.”
Rose nodded and got her cart rolling again. “You bet he is.”
Just an ordinary weekday afternoon at the supermarket, and as she took her leave of Barry, she at first mistook what was happening to her for something mundane, maybe low sugar. She was prone to sugar crashes, and usually kept a candybar in her purse. Then she realized someone was inside her head. Someone was looking.
Rose had not risen to her position as head of the True Knot by being indecisive. She halted with her cart pointed toward the meat counter (her planned next stop) and immediately leaped into the conduit some nosy and potentially dangerous person had established. Not a member of the True, she would have known any one of them immediately, but not an ordinary rube, either.
No, this was far from ordinary.
The market swung away and suddenly she was looking out at a mountain range. Not the Rockies, she would have recognized those. These were smaller. The Catskills? The Adirondacks? It could have been either, or some other. As for the looker . . . Rose thought it was a child. Almost certainly a girl, and one she had encountered before.
I have to see what she looks like, then I can find her anytime I want to. I have to get her to look in a mir—
But then a thought as loud as a shotgun blast in a closed room
(NO! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!)
wiped her mind clean and sent her staggering against shelves of canned soups and vegetables. They went cascading to the floor, rolling everywhere. For a moment or two Rose thought she was going to follow them, swooning like the dewy heroine of a romance novel. Then she was back. The girl had broken the connection, and in rather spectacular fashion.
Was her nose bleeding? She wiped it with her fingers and checked. No. Good.
One of the stockboys came rushing up. “Are you okay, ma’am?”
“Fine. Just felt a little faint for a second or two. Probably from the tooth extraction I had yesterday. It’s passed off now. I’ve made a mess, haven’t I? Sorry. Good thing it was cans instead of bottles.”
“No problem, no problem at all. Would you like to come up front and sit down on the taxi bench?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Rose said. And it wasn’t, but she was done shopping for the day. She rolled her cart two aisles over and left it there.
10
She had brought her Tacoma (old but reliable) down from the high-country campground west of Sidewinder, and once she was in the cab, she pulled her phone out of her purse and hit speed dial. It rang at the other end just a single time.
“What’s up, Rosie-girl?” Crow Daddy.
“We’ve got a problem.”
Of course it was also an opportunity. A kid with enough in her boiler to set off a blast like that—to not only detect Rose but send her reeling—wasn’t just a steamhead but the find of the century. She felt like Captain Ahab, for the first time sighting his great white whale.
“Talk to me.” All business now.
“A little over two years ago. The kid in Iowa. Remember him?”
“Sure.”
“You also remember me telling you we had a looker?”
“Yeah. East Coast. You thought it was probably a girl.”
“It was a girl, all right. She just found me again. I was in Sam’s, minding my own business, and then all at once there she was.”
“Why, after all this time?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. But we have to have her, Crow. We have to have her.”
“Does she know who you are? Where we are?”
Rose had thought about this while walking to the truck. The intruder hadn’t seen her, of that much she was sure. The kid had been on the inside looking out. As to what she had seen? A supermarket aisle. How many of those were there in America? Probably a million.
“I don’t think so, but that’s not the important part.”
“Then what is?”
“Remember me telling you she was big steam? Huge steam? Well, she’s even bigger than that. When I tried to turn it around on her, she blew me out of her head like I was a piece of milkweed fluff. Nothing like that’s ever happened to me before. I would have said it was impossible.”
“Is she potential True or potential food?”
“I don’t know.” But she did. They needed steam—stored steam—a lot more than they needed fresh recruits. Besides, Rose wanted no one in the True with that much power.
“Okay, how do we find her? Any ideas?”
Rose thought of what she’d seen through the girl’s eyes before she had been so unceremoniously booted back to Sam’s Supermarket in Sidewinder. Not much, but there had been a store . . .
She said, “The kids call it the Lickety-Spliff.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing, never mind. I need to think about it. But we’re going to have her, Crow. We’ve got to have her.”
There was a pause. When he spoke again, Crow sounded cautious. “The way you’re talking, there might be enough to fill a dozen canisters. If, that is, you really don’t want to try Turning her.”
Rose gave a distracted, yapping laugh. “If I’m right, we don’t have enough canisters to store the steam from this one. If she was a mountain, she’d be Everest.” He made no reply. Rose didn’t need to see him or poke into his mind to know he was flabbergasted. “Maybe we don’t have to do either one.”
“I don’t follow.”
Of course he didn’t. Long-think had never been Crow’s specialty. “Maybe we don’t have to Turn her or kill her. Think cows.”
“Cows.”
“You can butcher one and get a couple of months’ worth of steaks and hamburgers. But if you keep it alive and take care of it, it will give milk for six years. Maybe even eight.”
Silence. Long. She let it stretch. When he replied, he sounded more cautious than ever. “I’ve never heard of anything like that. We kill em once we’ve got the steam or if they’ve got something we need and they’re strong enough to survive the Turn, we Turn em. The way we Turned Andi back in the eighties. Grampa Flick might say different, if you believe him he remembers all the way back to when Henry the Eighth was killing his wives, but I don’t think the True has ever tried just holding onto a steamhead. If she’s as strong as you say, it could be dangerous.”
Tell me something I don’t know. If you’d felt what I did, you’d call me crazy to even think about it. And maybe I am. But . . .
But she was tired of spending so much of her time—the whole family’s time—scrambling for nourishment. Of living like tenth-century Gypsies when they should have been living like the kings and queens of creation. Which was what they were.
“Talk to Grampa, if he’s feeling better. And Heavy Mary, she’s been around almost as long as Flick. Snakebite Andi. She’s new, but she’s got a good head on her shoulders. Anyone else you think might have valuable input.”
“Jesus, Rosie. I don’t know—”
“Neither do I, not yet. I’m still reeling. All I’m asking right now is for you to do some spadework. You are the advance man, after all.”
“Okay . . .”
“Oh, and make sure you talk to Walnut. Ask him what drugs might keep a rube child nice and docile for a long period of time.”
“This girl doesn’t sound like much of a rube to me.”
“Oh, she is. A big old fat rube milk-cow.”
Not exactly true. A great big white whale, that’s what she is.
Rose ended the call without waiting to see if Crow Daddy had anything else to say. She was the boss, and as far as she was concerned, the discussion was over.
She’s a white whale, and I want her.
But Ahab hadn’t wanted his whale just because Moby would provide tons of blubber and almost endless barrels of oil, and Rose didn’t want the girl because she might—given the right drug cocktails and a lot of powerful psychic soothing—provide a nearly endless supply of steam. It was more personal than that. Turn her? Make her part of the True Knot? Never. The kid had kicked Rose the Hat out of her head as if she were some annoying religious goofball going door-to-door and handing out end-of-the-world tracts. No one had ever given her that kind of bum’s rush before. No matter how powerful she was, she had to be taught a lesson.
And I’m just the woman for the job.
Rose the Hat started her truck, pulled out of the supermarket parking lot, and headed for the family-owned Bluebell Campground. It was a really beautiful location, and why not? One of the world’s great resort hotels had once stood there.
But of course, the Overlook had burned to the ground long ago.